"Our
press's penchant for reporting lies as truth about one
president, and then suppressing truths about another,
demonstrates a sort of cognitive disorder actually more
worrying than any simple 'bias,' liberal or 'conservative."
What this grand disorder has produced, in these United
States, is a press system as irrational as those in power.
Never fearing that the press might act on our behalf, they
simply use it to define reality for us, so that it has
worked here as it has worked in closed societies, where
truth remains negotiable -- things meaning always, and only,
what Bush/Cheney's GOP interprets them to mean."

-
Mark Crispin Miller Cruel and Unusual
(137)

On Monday, August 2, a federal
crime was committed in plain view of millions of Americans
and millions more abroad. A Pakistani intelligence mole,
crucial in the “war” against al Qaeda, was outed by an
individual in the Bush Administration.

We know that this
was a federal crime from the preceding (and still unsolved)
Valerie Plame case. While the culprit is still unindicted,
the fact that the “outing” of a covert intelligence asset is
a crime, is now known to all.

Today, more than a month
later, the individual who blew the cover of the Pakistani
double-agent has not been identified, much less arrested and
indicted. And the story has disappeared from the media –
which is, arguably, the greatest outrage of all.

For those
who have forgotten, here is a recapitulation of the
crime.

On Sunday, August 1, Homeland Security Secretary
Tom Ridge announced that due to “new and unusually specific
information,” he was raising the terrorist threat level from
yellow (“elevated”) to orange (“high”), thus bumping news of
the just-completed Democratic convention off the front
pages.

The “targets” of the terrorists, we were told, were
five specifically identified financial institutions in
Washington and New York.

In retrospect, several
intriguing questions arise: (1) If five specific buildings
in two cities were targeted, why a nationwide alert? (2) Why
any alert at all? Would it not have been better to warn only
the occupants of the buildings, keeping the “confidential”
tip-off a secret, so as to entrap the terrorists?

As more
information about the “plot” emerged, the official version
began to unravel. It turned out that the “intelligence” was
three to four years old, and that it had been gathered from
the internet and other publicly available sources. In
addition, there was no evidence of recent al Qaeda
planning.

So we were asked to believe that all this old
material was part of a three-year old plot scheduled
precisely for early August, 2004, and directed to five
specific buildings.

With official credibility
hemorrhaging, emergency intervention was necessary. It
arrived the very next day, on Monday, with the “fresh
information” that the data wasn’t all that old, after all.
As Reuters reported:

The New York Times
published a story on Monday saying U.S. officials had
disclosed that a man arrested secretly in Pakistan was the
source of the bulk of information leading to the security
alerts. The newspaper named him as Khan, although it did not
say how it had learned his name. U.S. officials subsequently
confirmed the name to other news organizations on Monday
morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working
under cover at the time, helping to catch al Qaeda
suspects." (Juan Cole)

OOPS!

So there was the crime, as plain as the smirk on
Dubya’s face: the “outing” of an intelligence asset.

The revelation that a mole within al
Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its "orange
alert" this month has shocked security experts, who say the
outing of the source may have set back the war on terror....

Reuters learned from Pakistani intelligence sources on
Friday that computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan,
arrested secretly in July, was working under cover to help
the authorities track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and
the United States when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

"The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse,"
said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's
Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing
compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so
difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?"

"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage,
counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth.... Running
agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of
intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major
setback which negates months and years of work, which may be
difficult to recover."

So it comes to
this: In order to escape from a public relations
embarrassment, the Busheviks willingly exposed a “mole” – a
source of information from inside the operations and
planning center of al Qaeda.

Similarly, Valerie Plame’s
crucially important operation was shut down, in order to
punish her husband, Joe Wilson, for committing the crime of
premeditated truth-telling.

Once again, the Busheviks
burned down the barn to roast the pig.

And what was the
political price they paid for these catastrophic blunders?
Essentially zilch. True, “Plame-gate” is still under
investigation, though with only two months to go, the
damaging denouement will likely be postponed until after the
election. Maybe a minor White House apparatchik will be
sacrificed. No further damage – until the nuclear device
that Plame’s operation might have intercepted falls into the
hands of al Qaeda.

As for “Pak-gate,” after a month, it
has totally disappeared from the media radar, presumably
never to surface again. No investigation, no indictment, no
political cost – no cost at all, except perhaps the lives of
a few thousand of our fellow citizens, when the shipping
container containing the WMD package from al Qaeda, about
which double-agent Khan might have alerted us, enters one of
our harbors.

This is the stuff of major scandal. Had this
happened during the administration of a Democratic
president, Congress would even now be drawing up articles of
impeachment. In an election year, that president, like LBJ,
would choose not to run for re-election, and for good
reason: he would be unelectable.

But not this
administration and not this president. Instead, the media
hasn't touched this scandal, much less investigated it.
“Pak-gate” (for which I must invent a name, because the
media has not), is gone and forgotten: unexamined by
Congressional oversight, and uninvestigated by our
“journalists.”

Where’s the outrage?

Meanwhile,
the totally baseless and transparently mendacious “Swift
Boat” smear resounds. The media presents “both sides” of the
controversy, pretending that the accusers even have a
“side.” A responsible press would have looked to the merits
of the accusations and, finding none, would have exposed the
scam sufficiently to have disgraced the slanderers, and made
an example of them that might discourage subsequent attempts
to besmirch honorable political candidates.

But we’ve
seen so much of this two-faced, double-standard so-called
journalism that we should be used to it by now. Accustomed,
but not tolerant.

Eight years and
$70 million of persistent probing of the public and private
lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton, resulted in nothing more
than the discovery of an illicit but consensual sex
act.

Groundless smears against Al Gore – that he had claimed to
have “invented the internet” (false), had claimed to have
“discovered Love Canal” (false), and so on. But no mention
of George W. Bush’s business failures, his possibly illegal
investment deals, his “escape” from his National Guard
obligations, his record as the Governor of
Texas.

The evidence of the media’s
bias in the 2000 election is clear and incontrovertible, as
Paul Begala demonstrated in a November, 2002 Nexus-Lexus
search:

There were exactly 704 stories
in the campaign about this flap of Gore inventing the
Internet. There were only 13 stories about Bush failing to
show up for his National Guard duty for a year. There were
well over 1,000 stories -- Nexus stopped at 1,000 -- about
Gore and the Buddhist temple. Only 12 about Bush being
accused of insider trading at Harken Energy. There were 347
about Al Gore wearing earth tones, but only 10 about the
fact that Dick Cheney did business with Iran and Iraq and
Libya…

And now, the Administration of
George Bush, arguably the most incompetent and corrupt in US
history, is given a free pass by the media.

Had the
current management of the Washington Post been in charge
during the Watergate burglary, Woodward and Bernstein would
no doubt have been ordered to get back to covering freeway
smash-ups, and Richard Nixon would have finished his term,
unexposed and unpunished.

There are precious few
indicators of change in this dismal situation. The New York
Times and the Washington Post, “flagships” of American
journalism, have both published tepid apologies for their
failure to serve as responsible watch-dogs of the
government, in the run-up to the Iraq war. But now, having
apologized for their misbehavior, they are repeating it.
There is an abundance of opportunity for critical, objective
and balanced reporting of the current election campaign.
Once again, it is an opportunity not taken.

In the face of
all this evidence, it is difficult to understand how anyone
with more than a casual acquaintance with the corporate
media persist in the belief that the media have a “liberal
bias”?

The examples of the corporate media’s double
dealing could fill a book, as indeed they have, many times
over. And I expect to continue this elaboration in
subsequent essays. But it is time, now, to bring this to a
close.

When I was a youngster half a century ago, the US
press delighted in relating the fantasies of Pravda and
Isvestia, and we all wondered “how could they get away with
printing such outright lies,” and “what kind of effect does
all this have on the Soviet People?” Today, there is not all
that much difference between Pravda c.1960s and the US media
today. With FOX, right-wing talk radio and the NY Post there
is no difference. As an October, 2003 study demonstrated,
the more one watches FOX News, the less informed one is. Shaun Waterman of UPI
reports:

It's official -- watching
Fox News makes you ignorant. To be precise, researchers from
the Program on International Policy at the University of
Maryland found that those who relied on Fox for their news
were more likely than those who relied on any other news
source to have what the study called "significant
misperceptions" about the war in Iraq...

After decades of this kind of “journalism,”
discerning Russians came to appreciate that they were being
systematically lied to by their media – a realization that
has not yet come to most Americans.

For the Soviet
citizens seeking to escape the fog of “official news,” their
reality check was the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe,
the BBC, illegally smuggled-in publications and “Samizdat” –
unauthorized personal publications (by handscript or
typewriter).

For us, it is the Internet – while it lasts.
After the internet is privatized and then closed to
dissenters, we will have to devise our own “Samizdat,”
perhaps of audiotapes and computer disks.

Or perhaps, just
perhaps, we might, as an aroused public, demand the return
of a free and diverse commercial media.

For the campaign
immediately ahead, we do not ask that the media join “our
side.” It will quite suffice if the media renounce their
allegiance to the Bush regime, and instead direct that
allegiance to the truth – to facts, evidence, clarity and
logic. That is their legitimate function and their duty to
the public. We demand that the media present the facts in an
even-handed manner, investigate indications of corruption
and mendacity, and spare us the trivia.

Then John Kerry
and John Edwards will win.

Because Rove and the Bushistas
can’t handle the truth. And we the people can.

*************

Copyright 2004 by Ernest
Partridge

Bio-Tag: Dr. Ernest Partridge is a
consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of
Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the
website, "The Online Gadfly" ( www.igc.org/gadfly) and
co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" ( www.crisispapers.org).

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